Criminal District Court Judge Camille Buras set an April 3 court date to rule on subpoenas that attorneys for Kentrell "Black" Hickerson will be seeking to reveal how Palantir's program, called "Gotham," has been used in New Orleans -- and particularly in the case against Hickerson and 19 other suspected "3NG" gang members.
Buras stopped short of setting a hearing date over the dispute, but she agreed that Hickerson's lead attorney, Kevin Vogeltanz, could add the argument to Hickerson's pending motion for a new trial.
In a legal filing last week, Vogeltanz claimed that police used Gotham to build the 2013 indictment of alleged 3NG members. The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office should have disclosed that to Hickerson, as well as the software’s role in analyzing whether the gang existed at all, Vogeltanz said.
Vogeltanz’s motion hinged on the Feb. 27 article from The Verge that first brought the city’s use of Gotham to public attention. Citing former Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas, the article said that the NOPD used Gotham to zero in on gangs “like” 3NG.
However, the article did not elaborate on whether or how Gotham was used to build the 3NG case in particular.
The top gang prosecutor for the District Attorney’s Office said in court that he had no objection to Buras considering Vogeltanz’s motion – but he dismissed Palantir’s role in the sprawling 3NG investigation.
“The state of Louisiana wants full transparency,” Assistant District Attorney Alex Calenda said. “All (Palantir) does is take 15 to 16 law enforcement databases and aggregate information that’s already accessible to law enforcement and compiles this information in a concise manner, rather than have a detective go through the 16 databases.”
Vogeltanz said that if the software produced a negative report on Hickerson’s gang connections, or even a total absence of Hickerson’s name in a report on 3NG, that should have been turned over to the defense before trial.
Calenda said he was unclear what Hickerson’s lawyer was alleging.
Buras said she had an idea: He is “looking for any Palantir/Gotham report that shows Mr. Hickerson was not connected to the 3NG case, or the absence of his name,” which “perhaps” might undermine the testimony of officers at his trial, she said.
Calenda called the idea that Palantir analysis spurred the 3NG investigation “revisionist history.” The case began the old-fashioned way, he said, with a detective hidden inside an abandoned house in Central City taking pictures of drug dealers.
Hickerson, 38, was convicted of racketeering and drug conspiracy counts after a 10-day trial in Buras’s courtroom two years ago. Prosecutors and former gang allies said he committed or directed a series of killings in a battle over turf around Third and Galvez streets.
At trial and afterwards, however, Vogeltanz argued that authorities had created the idea that 3NG was a gang. He pointed to testimony from a key cooperating witness, Tyrone Knockum, who cast doubt on the gang’s cohesiveness.
“Is it a bona fide gang or is it a group of people that grew up around each other and hang around with each other?” Vogeltanz asked.
“It’s a group of people that grew up around each other,” Knockum said.
In March 2017, Vogeltanz filed a motion for a new trial based on testimony from the separate federal trial of 10 alleged “39’ers” gang members that the government promised leniency to Knockum if he testified for the state.
The new allegations about Palantir were made in a motion to supplement that earlier bid for a new trial - a motion that Buras granted Tuesday.
After the hearing, a District Attorney's Office spokesman issued a flat-out denial that Palantir was used against Hickerson.
"The NOPD’s Palantir software played no role whatsoever in Mr. Hickerson’s indictment and prosecution. Furthermore, any claim that the NOPD’s Palantir program contained exculpatory evidence to Mr. Hickerson’s defense is without merit," said Ken Daley.
©2018 The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
